Reads like a buttoned-down Tom Wolfe.
Satirical self-portrait of a tycoon better at managing his money than his family—in Crawford’s first novel since Some Instructions (1978).
Leon Tuggs is a starchy old blowhard whose fortune just keeps on growing. Its basis is his invention, the Thingie, a small paper product that has become as indispensable as Kleenex. (Leon got the formula “by informal means” from a suddenly impoverished chemist. Message: He’ll be as ruthless as the next guy.) Leon has a vast estate in Connecticut but spends most of his time in the air, jetting around the world to keep his empire humming. While aloft, he writes notes to his grandchildren, Fabian and Rowena, to accompany his birthday gifts to them of scale models of cars that reflect the trajectory of his career. Thus the tale is epistolary in format, though it’s more like an extended toast (Leon excels at those) to money (“our most effective god”), to mobility, or to greater consumption of those man-made things that will eventually replace unproductive nature. Though his daughter Deedums is on-board, son-in-law Chip is a wretched lower-case liberal democrat (as opposed to the Conservative Republican Leon). More worrying is Leon’s wife, Deirdre. Leon doesn’t like women (“Men invent the world while women only populate it”), but he does need his wife, even though she’s seeking out the simple life—in a tent! Her nonsense exposes Leon to media mockery, which intensifies when he’s found wearing drag. This moment of farce recalls the purposeful lunacy of Crawford’s earlier work, but here that lunacy is much less on display, the novel’s format a hindrance to it. There will be more disappointment for Leon as his grandchildren become teenagers and trash or trade his priceless model cars, but the patriarch, nothing daunted, will install actual cars in his expanded living room. His marriage, though, will pretty much collapse (divorce is not an option for a Tuggs).
Reads like a buttoned-down Tom Wolfe.Pub Date: March 4, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-557-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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